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Enabling License Later (evaluation) mode for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1 was just released this week and it brings a number of new capabilities including the recently announced VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA solution. One feature that I was really happy to see get introduced is called "License Later" better known as evaluation mode, which will now allow users to deploy VCF with Cloud Builder without requiring the component license keys up front, which was the previous user experience.

From a hands on and/testing perspective, this will allow for more users to experience VCF and reduce the barrier to entry for those that want to play with the product. Speaking of hands on, I wanted to try out the new evaluation mode using my VCF Automated Lab Deployment script which I had just assumed you would leave the license fields blank within the deployment JSON file but that did not work. After speaking with VCF Engineering, I found that there is a new deployment parameter that must be appended to the JSON file if you are deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder API.

Once I added the configuration, the VCF deployment kicked off successfully!

Deployment JSON:

For deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder API, you will need to append deployWithoutLicenseKeys with a value of true and the all license fields can be left blank or omitted all together

deployWithoutLicenseKeys: true

Deployment Workbook:

For deploying VCF using the Cloud Builder UI, there is a new entry in the workbook called "License Now" which you can select No and leave all license fields blank.

I have already updated my VCF Automated Lab Deployment script to support the new evaluation mode with VCF 5.1.1 as I have already been asked about the capability from a few customers 🙂

For Workload Domain creation, you can also deploy with the new license later feature by adding the "deployWithoutLicenseKeys" parameter into your JSON specification. For an example, search for this parameter in the JSON example for the VCF Domain Creation API.

Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) host commission using ESXi Kickstart

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ESXi Scripted Installation (Kickstart) has been my go-to method for achieving zero-touch provisioning of ESXi hosts at scale, which I had started using back in the ESX 2.5 days when I was a customer! Having worked at some very larger enterprises, I got the opportunity to experience and manage a variety of environments for automated ESXi provisioning.

For more than a decade, I have written hundreds of articles about ESXi kickstart and how it can help solve a variety of use cases stemming from my own background to some of the unique requirements that have come up from some of our largest VMware customers. To date, some of my favorite ESXi kickstart solutions includes my 2014 blog post in automating VM deployments using a USB device which became the basis for my USB to SDDC project in 2017.

While playing with the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1 Holodeck release (currently in Beta), I was thinking about the current VCF host commissioning workflow, which is a multi-step process after an ESXi host has been provisioned where you need to manually (or using automation) to add the hosts to SDDC Manager before they can be consumed for either expanding and/or deploying a new workload domain.

I thought, why could we not just skip this step all together and that was when I had the idea of just incorporating the VCF host commissioning workflow automatically as part of an ESXi Kickstart installation! 😀

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Determining new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) & VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license usage in vSphere 8.0 Update 2b

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vSphere 8.0 Update 2b was just released last week and with this release, customers can now take advantage of the new included 100 GiB trial vSAN storage capacity for each deployed VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) core for use with vSAN!

Note: If you would like to understand how much vSAN storage you are entitled to (100GiB for VVF and 1TiB for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)), check out the new inventory and calculator script in KB 95927 (brownfield) and KB 96426 (greenfield) for more details.

In addition to installing and/or updating your vCenter Server to vSphere 8.0 Update 2b, you will also need to login to Customer Connect to download your new VVF and/or VCF license keys that will activate your vSAN entitlement.

I have already received questions on how to determine whether an ESXi host has been licensed with the new VVF and/or VCF license keys and which you can do so by using the vSphere UI by navigating to Administration->Licensing->Licenses->Assets->Hosts or vSAN Clusters and using the various filters, but this can be time consuming when you have a large environment with various license editions.

This is where automation and vSphere API can help!

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